You’ve probably heard the old saying that you need to spend money in order to make money. The advent of e-commerce, however, has upended that line of thinking to a certain extent. When you sell online, you don’t need a physical storefront or employees – you just need a domain name and hosting, and those things are surprisingly inexpensive. You don’t even need to purchase inventory if you sell digital goods or have orders fulfilled by a drop shipper.
Even with an online business, though, there’s still no getting around the fact that you’ll need to invest if you want your business to grow. You may need to invest your time, your money or both – and no matter what, you’ll probably be waiting a while before the business begins to generate real revenue.
People often say that the best way to generate income for a new online business is by advertising on social media or Google Ads. With pay-per-click advertising, however, it’s very easy to burn through your entire marketing budget and have little to show for it. In addition, if your product is something like a disposable vape, advertising that way isn’t even an option because there are many types of products that online ad networks won’t accept.
If you want to learn how to market an online business cheaply and generate the greatest possible revenue while spending as little as possible, you’re in the right place. This is the cheapest way to promote an online business.
Produce Great Content
Contents
The most important part of your website will always be its text content because that’s what brings visitors to your site. People search for keywords on Google, and Google suggests results that seem relevant. If you want to have a chance to appear in the results for a search, your website needs to have text relevant to that search. Your website has two primary types of content: commercial content and blog content.
How to Produce Great Commercial Content
Your website’s commercial content includes all sales-oriented content such as the text on your home page, your category pages and your product pages. This content serves two primary purposes. Its primary purpose is to help convince visitors to become customers – but before it can do that, you need to have visitors. Therefore, the other purpose of this content is to attract organic traffic from Google.
Every page of commercial content on your website has a primary keyword, and your goal is to attract search traffic for that keyword if you can. The primary keyword for a category page, for instance, might be “Athletic Shorts,” while the primary keyword for a product page would be the name of that specific product like “Black Nike Running Shorts for Women.” When you create the text for a commercial page, you should always have that keyword in mind.
When you write content for a category or product page, remember that your primary goal isn’t to define what that thing is. You don’t want visitors who are trying to find out what running shorts are – you want visitors whose intention is to buy those products. There’s a subtle difference. Your text should match the intent of the visitors you want to receive.
How to Produce Great Blog Content
When you’re trying to write blog posts for a new online business, you should generally avoid writing content that’s commercial in nature because all of your competitors already have blog posts addressing those topics. It’s much wiser to focus on informational topics. Informational topics won’t have as much competition on Google, so you’ll be much more likely to get organic traffic if you write about those topics. A high-quality blog post without a commercial angle also has a decent chance to earn links. Over time, links from other websites will help to improve the rankings of your commercial pages.
Tell People About Your Best Content
Earning links from other websites is the best way to improve the rankings of your site’s commercial content. If you simply write informational blog posts and wait for the links to appear, though, you’re going to be waiting for a long time because website owners are often reluctant to link to sites that aren’t already established authorities in their fields. So, you might have to help the process along a little.
Start by identifying a blog post that’s truly worthy of receiving organic links. Like your website’s commercial content, every blog post should have at least one target keyword phrase – a search term for which you’re hoping the post will receive traffic. When you’re writing a blog post, search for that term on Google and look at the websites already ranking for that term. Your goal should always be to produce articles that are better than any of the results currently appearing on Google.
Once in a while, you’re going to write an article that’s demonstrably better than anything else that you can find online. For example, maybe you’ll conduct original research and produce entirely new content that isn’t available elsewhere. When you have something really special – something so good that website owners would be doing their readers a disservice by not linking to it – that’s when it’s time to reach out to those websites and tell them about your content.
Keep Your Customers Engaged
So far, this article has focused entirely on the value of bringing traffic to your website from search engines – but that’s not the only way to promote your business and generate revenue. At first, your primary task as an online entrepreneur will be to attract as many new customers as possible. After a while, though, you’ll have a customer base – and at that point, it’ll be time to allocate your resources a bit differently. You’ll always want to win as many new customers as you can, of course – but to truly maximize your revenue and growth, you’ll also need to keep your existing customers engaged.
The most effective way to keep your customers engaged is by reaching out to them directly – and the best way to do that is by using a mailing list. As soon as your website begins to generate sales, you should begin collecting customers’ email addresses and adding that contact information to a database. Once you’ve collected a significant number of email addresses, it’s time to start sending periodic newsletters. For example, you might want to let your customers know when you’re about to begin a promotion. Always respect your customers’ time and make sure that every newsletter provides value.